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Chocolate Paste
Melt one half pound of chocolate with enough plain syrup to make a smooth paste. Add one half pint of evaporated milk and one half tablespoonful of vanilla extract. Keep in a covered jar in a cool place, and use as needed.
This is a soda fountain base, not a confection: a concentrated chocolate paste meant to be spooned into glasses and thinned with soda water, milk or hot water to order. A few of the terms belong to the fountain trade rather than the home kitchen.
- The hinge: add the syrup hot, and graduallyWarm the syrup rather than adding it cold — the recipe has the chocolate and syrup melting together, and cold liquid stirred into melting chocolate can make it seize into a grainy mass.
- "Plain syrup"Fountain shorthand for simple syrup, sugar dissolved in water and boiled briefly; the proportions varied from shop to shop. "Enough" is left to the cook: add it by feel until the paste falls thickly from the spoon.
- What "chocolate" meantIn the trade this would be unsweetened cake chocolate, the kind sold in blocks for baking. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the nearest equivalent; if you use a sweet dark bar instead, cut the syrup back sharply or the result will be cloying.
- Half a pintOne cup of evaporated milk. Evaporated milk here is the unsweetened canned kind, not sweetened condensed, which would push the sugar far past the point of balance.
- Vanilla off the heatHalf a tablespoon is about 1 1/2 teaspoons. Stir it in once the paste has cooled somewhat, since some of the aroma of an alcohol-based extract is driven off by heat.
- Storage"A cool place" in this period would have meant an icebox or a cellar rather than anything as cold as a modern refrigerator. Once opened, evaporated milk is perishable: refrigerate the jar and use it within about four or five days.
- Yield and useThin the paste to order: stirred into a glass with a little cold water before the soda goes in, or whisked into hot milk for cocoa.
The book belongs to a small genre of trade manuals for druggists and soda fountain men. Fountain operators needed drinks that could be assembled in seconds, so much was reduced in advance to a syrup or a paste and held in covered jars, a habit this recipe follows. Canned unsweetened evaporated milk, commercially available from the 1880s and widespread by the 1890s, suited such shops because it kept in the can without ice and gave a body that plain milk could not.